THE HOLY GRAIL: CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

In this video,& Talent Board Chairman Elaine Orler is joined by staffing expert Gerry Crispin to discuss ways in which to measure and improve the candidate experience.

Watch this on-demand webinar now to learn:

How social media is increasingly shaping brand perception and candidate referrals

Tips for setting and delivering upon recruiting expectations to offer a positive candidate experience

The level and types of feedback recruiters & should solicit to improve the hiring process

The impact of a positive or negative candidate experience on candidate referrals, brand perception, and financial metrics

Webinar Transcript:

Scot: Now to share some thoughts on the candidate experience is Elaine Orler, Chairman of the Talent Board.

Elaine: Hello and welcome to the webinar. And I’m so excited to have a guest speaker with me today. My name is Elaine Orler, and I’m Chairman of the Talent Board, non-profit organization for supporting the candidate experience. And today, I get to interview and spend time with one of my closest and most desired mentors in the industry, Gerry Crispin. Gerry, welcome. I’m so excited you could be here.

Gerry: Yeah, that’s a great point to make. What we really need to do is level lead this so that we have consistently a given percentage that are not hired. Because what we’re learning is that if you did make an offer, that candidate is on average about 20% more positive than those who were not.

You’d might think they should a lot more positive, but by enlarge, there’s a 20% bump in terms of a Net Promoter Score simply by looking at just those who were hired. And so you need to have a clean distribution of those that are hired versus those that aren’t in order to get a more reliable number.

Elaine: Again, if we look at this data going forward, the ability . . . I always looked back on the percentages of these referral programs that were always far exceeding in sourcing data. And again, this is probably another area where you and I sat across the table from each other because I always said a referral as a source. A referral is a channel, it’s not a source.

But to have an external referral, to have a candidate that came through the process that wasn’t hired, but still is very comfortable with the process and still had a positive experience with the employer, referring somebody else that you ultimately hire, that I would call a referral source.

Because the value of that, the time, the energy, the cost to recruit or to identify that person has drastically come down because you have an advocate already communicate the value of your organization.

Gerry: And it shows up in many different ways. Even if you have a sourcing team who’s contacting on a regular basis people who have not come to you, you find that those individuals have some perception of you, that employment brand, if you will. And when you dig into it, some of that employment brand was based upon the references of other people, people who had come in contact with you.

And so when you call somebody up and they said, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I know a couple of people who applied in the past and they said some extraordinary things about your company,” is a way different approach, response than if you reach somebody and they go, “Oh yeah. No, not interested in applying. I’ve talked to people who applied to your company before.”

Elaine: Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, looking forward to more of the research that we have coming out on that over the next couple of weeks. But also the fact that we’ve got the 2015 programs already launched. And just some key factors related to the candidate experience award, it’s free for organizations to apply.

That’s your commitment to the industry. The reason for that is we want organizations to have the benchmark data. They get a rich set of data just from being the employer’s survey, but also from serving their candidates through our tools. And if their candidate feedback is positive, they win a great award.

We have our symposium coming up in the fall. But Gerry, I would love to hear any final thoughts that you have just around the program for this year. Do you want to put in your estimates for the number of candidates to respond? I know we debate this every year as well.

Gerry: I know. I certainly would love to drive as many as 500 companies globally this year to participate. Because by participating, you’re not only helping yourself, but you’re helping really the profession better understand what is the baseline that we should expect in terms of how we treat candidates.

And this gives us a good deal of opportunity to share that with corporations. It’s why we set this up as a non-profit, to be free. And I think that there’s an awful lot of folks who have stepped up and participated by giving us their time, their talent, their treasure, their whatever to help move this needle.

There’s a real shift, I think, evolution taking place in how we look at recruiting as an alignment of the needs of all of the stakeholders, including the candidate. And it’s not to exclude the other stakeholders in the process, but it’s the candidate who by enlarge needs our help because they don’t have the ability necessarily to have a voice without our help in collecting that data.

So I find this an exciting opportunity, exciting time. I think every company, large and small, has the opportunity to join in and participate, as well as getting data that helps them better understand how their process is being received by the candidate stakeholders.

Elaine: Gerry, as always, I could not say it better. Thank you. Thank you for the time and the conversation. I’m so excited to this year’s program and continuing this movement and mission with you. And with that, I want to thank everybody for listening in and we’re done.